On the threshold of forgetting: Amnesiac identities and the Brazilian capital

Centuries after Locke asserted the importance of memory to identity, Freudian psychology argued that what was forgotten was of equal importance as to what was remembered. The closing decades of the nineteenth century saw a rising interest in the nature of forgetting, resulting in a reassessment and newfound distrust of the long revered faculty of memory. The relationship between memory and identity was inverted, seeing forgetting also become a means for forging identity. This newfound distrust of memory manifested in the writings of Nietzsche who in 1874 called for society to learn to feel unhistorically and distance itself from the past - in what was essentially tantamount to a cultural forgetting. Following the Nietzschean call, the architecture of Modernism was also compelled by the need to 'overcome' the limits imposed by history. This paper examines notions of identity through the shifting boundaries of remembering and forgetting, with particular reference to the construction of Brazilian identity through the ‘repression’ of history and memory in the design of the Brazilian capital. Designed as a forward-looking modernist utopia, transcending the limits imposed by the country's colonial heritage, the design for Brasilia exploited the anti-historicist agenda of modernism to emancipate the country from cultural and political associations with the Portuguese Empire. This paper examines the relationship between place, memory and forgetting through a discussion of the design for Brasilia.

The myth of the nation: Historiography of New Zealand architecture since 1907

This paper considers the relationship between the recent historiography (of the last quarter century) of “New Zealand architecture” and the historical notion of “New Zealand-ness” invoked in contemporary architecture. It argues that a more recent programmatic uptake of post-War discussions on national identity and regional specificity has fed the tendencies of practicing architects to defer to history in rhetorical defences of their work: the beach-side mansion as a contemporary expression of the 1950s bach; a formal modernism divorced from the social discourse adherent to the historical moment that it “restates”; and so on. The paper will consider instances in the historiography of New Zealand architecture where historians have compounded, consciously or accidentally, a problem that is systemic to the uses made by architects of historical knowledge (in the most general examples), identifying the difficulties of relying upon the tentative conclusions of an under-studied field in developing principles of contemporary architectural practice under the banners of New Zealand-ness, regionalism, or localism, or with reference to icons of New Zealand architectural history. At the heart of this paper is a reflection on historiographical responsibility in presenting knowledge of a national past to an audience that is eager to transform that knowledge into principles of contemporary production. What, the paper asks, is the historical basis for speaking of a New Zealand architecture? Can we speak of a national history of architecture distinct from a regional history, or from an international history of architecture?

Holt, Johnson and the 1966 Federal Election. A Question of Causality

US President Lyndon Johnson's state visit to Australia in October 1966, came at the pinnacle of support for Australia's military involvement in the Vietnam War. Johnson's visit also occurred just weeks before an election for the House of Representatives at which the ruling Liberal-Country Party Coalition won its eighth successive, and largest victory, The proximity of these events has led many to argue that a causal relationship exists between the two. Advocates of this thesis, however, have failed to support their position with any evidence other than the anecdotal. Contrary to the assertions made by numerous political historians and observers of the period, this paper finds no evidence to support a thesis of causality. This paper argues that the Coalition's landslide victory in 1966 was both a rejection of the tired and lacklustre leadership of Labor's Arthur Calwell and a measure of the electorate's overwhelming support for Holt and his Government's policies of conscription and military involvement in Vietnam.

Information literacy for the humanities researcher: A syllabus based on information habits research

This paper reviews the existing literature on the information behavior of researchers in the humanities, in order to develop a set of learning objectives which can be used in the planning of information literacy training programs for this group of library users.

What is a gene today?

Historians of genetics agree that multiple conceptions of the gene have coexisted at each stages in the history of genetics and that the resulting partial ambiguity has often contributed to the success of genetics, both because workers in different areas have needed to communicate and to draw on one another’s results despite wrestled with very different scientific challenges, and because empirical findings have often challenged the presuppositions of existing conceptions of the gene. Today, a number of different conceptions of the gene coexist in the biosciences. An ‘instrumental’ gene similar to that of classical genetics retains a critical role in the construction and interpretation of experiments in which the relationship between genotype and phenotype is explored via hybridization between organisms or directly between nucleic acid molecules. It also plays an important theoretical role in the foundations of disciplines such as quantitative genetics and population genetics. A ‘nominal’ gene, defined by the practice of genetic nomenclature, is a critical practical tool and allows communication between bioscientists in a wide range of fields to be grounded in welldefined sequences of nucleotides. This concept, however, does not embody major theoretical insights into genome structure or function. Instead, a ‘post-genomic’ conception of the gene embodies the continuing project of understanding how genome structure supports genome function, but with a deflationary picture of the gene as a structural unit. This final concept of the gene poses a significant challenge to earlier assumptions about the relationship between genome structure and function, and between genotype and phenotype.

Oase: Tijdschrift voor Architectuur = Oase: Architecture Journal

In recent years, both architectural historiography and architectural design practice have been characterized by significant shifts. These new perspectives and methodologies did not merely bring about internal changes, but also called into question the boundaries and relations between the two disciplines. This issue of OASE investigates the impact of these changes for both disciplines in a series of dialogues between historians, architects, designers and photographers, exploring themes such as the everyday, the landscape, heritage and visual culture.

Movement and figurality: The circulation diagram and the history of the architectural plan

Knowledge of the plan competes with self-consciousness of experience. The less we are able to understand our spatio-visual experience by the abstract coordinates of the plan, the more we are thrust back into a lived experience of the building in duration. This formula, frequently unacknowledged, has been one of the main precepts of the experientialist modernism which arises out of the picturesque and which stands in critique of classical idealism. One of the paths to critique this formula is by showing that the attention to the experience of the spaces in duration is predicated on obscuring, complicating and weakening the apprehension of the plan as a figure. Another development in the practice of modern planning has been architects using a kind of over-drawing where human circulation diagrams or 'movement lines' are drawn expressively across the orthographic plane; thus representing the lived experience of buildings. We will show that these two issues are linked; the plan's weak figure and the privilege this supposes for durational experience has a corollary - experience itself demands to be visible in the plan, and this is one origin of the present fascination with 'diagramming'. In this paper we explore the practice of architectural planning and its theoretical underpinnings in an attempt to show the viability of a history of architectural planning methods.